I'll Protest! I'll Demonstrate! I'll Stop Your Administration Cold! RAAAAAACIST!

IT'S JUST A FLESH WOUND! (And: YOU'RE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY!)

Give the poor tyke a hand....
(APPLAUSE).

Brexit Works Financial Miracle For Britain

Britain has world’s top economy

Brexit vote was Bank’s ‘Michael Fish moment’

The FTSE 100 surged after the referendum in June to reach a record high by the end of the year
Daniel Leal-Olivas/Getty Images

Britain ended last year as the strongest of the world’s advanced economies with growth accelerating in the six months after the Brexit vote.

Business activity hit a 17-month high last month, meaning that the economy grew by 2.2 per cent last year — more than the six other leading nations, including the US, Germany and Japan.

Far from slowing after the referendum in June, as predicted by the Treasury and Bank of England, growth appeared to have improved. GDP grew at 0.3 per cent and 0.6 per cent in the first two quarters of last year, compared with 0.6 per cent and an estimated 0.5 per cent in the final period.

Again and again and again the "experts" are totally, irredeemably, 180 degrees wrong. Leftist concepts are not designed to produce anything other than concentrated power for the Leftists.

Dr. Curry Speaks

Like the "Nuclear Option"? Then You'll LOVE the "Armageddon Rule"

House Republicans revive obscure rule that allows them to slash the pay of individual federal workers to $1

"House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.

The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to propose amending an appropriations bill to single out a government employee or cut a specific program.

The use of the rule would not be simple; a majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any such amendment. At the same time, opponents and supporters agree that the work of 2.1 million civil servants, designed to be insulated from politics, is now vulnerable to the whims of elected officials.

The revival of the Holman Rule was the brainchild of Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who is intent on increasing the powers of individual members of Congress to reassign workers as policy demands.

He favors a strategic application, likening it to a bullet from a sniper rifle rather than a shotgun. It’s unlikely — but not impossible — that members will “go crazy” and cut huge swaths of the workforce, he said.

House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday, Jan.3, he is "deeply concerned by a number of controversial provisions" included by the majority in the rules for the 115th Congress. He said the revival the Holman Rule, "undermines civil service protection."

“I can’t tell you it won’t happen,” he said in an interview Wednesday in his office. “The power is there. But isn’t that appropriate? Who runs this country, the people of the United States or the people on the people’s payroll?”

Democrats and federal employee unions say the provision, which one called the “Armageddon Rule,” could prove alarming to the federal workforce because it comes in combination with President-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of the Washington bureaucracy, his call for a freeze on government hiring and his nomination of Cabinet secretaries who in some cases seem to be at odds with the mission of the agencies they would lead.

“This is part of a very chilling theme that federal workers are seeing right now,” said Maureen Gilman, legislative director for the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal employees.

This maneuver is fully enabled by Harry Reid's use of the "Nuclear Option". Congress is now in the turn-around mode, and the future looks to be one of partisan war, just as Reid started it to get ObamaCare passed with purely Democrat votes. Cries for bi-partisan cooperation are alligator tears from the culpable Left which brought this about.

Further, the existence of federal employee unions is enough to warrant the use of this procedure to pare down the bloat in the multitudes of bureaus and agencies and departments. But also, because there is no consequence for bad behavior in the government (a Leftist trait if ever there was one), the consequences can be dealt from the congressional floor.

Of course in the future this will resolve to partisan "hits", but that's how the agencies and bureaus have been staffed, anyway, with Leftists filling all the jobs and making more jobs for more Leftists.

My favorite would be to assert the Armageddon Rule on the entire DOJ, the entire EPA, the entire IRS, and the entire Department of Education.

And Now, From His Safe Space...

Laci Green, Leftist-Uniter Personified

From Glenn Reynolds:

"Another example that’s been circulating on the Internet comes from YouTube sex-talker Laci Green. When the election was still uncertain, she tweeted: “Regardless of the outcome, we are clearly a *deeply* divided and broken country. So much work ahead to mend, heal, and restore the U in USA.” Just a few hours later, when it became clear that Hillary had lost, she changed her tune: “We are now under total Republican rule. Textbook fascism. F____ you, white America. F___ you, you racist, misogynist pieces of s___. G'night.”

Yes, that's how to impress and unite "white America" and all the minorities who voted against the psycho-Left. It brought us together in order to prevent your type of smarmy, Leftist idiocy from dominating the culture any longer. It'll take a while. But fools like Laci Green will become trivialized into... well, triviality.

(This is what happens when you shut down all the asylums and normalize all behaviors).

Judith Curry Resigns, But Doesn't Quit

JC in transition

Dr. Curry has been on the cutting edge of Climate Science, and has been saddled with an honest, truth seeking empirical attitude which has set her at odds with the Climate Change Doctrine and Narrative Industry. She is giving up a prized tenure which has turned into a sort of intellectual prison. She describes her predicament and her solution in a last post, at least as a tenured professor. Her future will include much more freedom of speech, freedom to publish, freedom to pursue than is available to her even in the vaunted "freedom" of tenure.

We can look forward to much more from Dr. Curry.

The Democrat Rush To Cold War With Putin

The correct tack for the Senate probe into the putative Russian connection to the hacked DNC emails is to probe for near-absolutes, as in empirical data. The Dems don't believe in absolutes such as Truth, but the objectivity of empirical validation should work.

What is empirically valid concerning Putin's intentions with regard to Trump? Assumptions not allowed.

What is empirically valid concerning the ACTUAL source of the hack? Assumptions not allowed.

What is empirically valid concerning the validity of the hacked emails? Assumptions not allowed.

As far as public information goes, it is not possible to empirically connect Putin's intentions, much less his overt actions, against the Democrat party. That Putin is a nationalist and not a globalist makes him an enemy of the Democrats, in principle. But did he attack the Democrats? Or is it merely the war mongering Democrats placing blame on their enemy?

The elephantine issue is the veracity of the emails released through Wikileaks. There has been no challenge as to that. The Dems even purged some beloved officials because of the facts released.

The problem for the Democrats is to dissemble and divert attention away from the elephant in the room: the Democrats have been totally corrupt from the top - down, and the world was allowed to see that. It is necessary then, to paper over that revelation with fevered, panicky charges of Other, Oppressor mischief which makes them the Victimhood principals simultaneously with demonstrating their Messiah-hood drive for "justice".

The Marxist three-class system is always, always in play for the Democrat/Leftists

Awww....

Donkey whining:

Schumer: I wish we hadn't triggered 'nuclear option'

The Donks did it because they were certain that they owned the entire future, and therefore half the country and the Constitution didn't matter any more. Now they find that they are actually marginalized and NOT part of the future, at least for four years. Suck it up.

Maybe the nuclear option can move on this:

Congress to Freeze State Department Funds Until U.S. Embassy Moves to Jerusalem

Bill seeks to counter Obama admin refusal to call Jerusalem Israel's capital

And definitely on this:

Senate Republicans just introduced an Obamacare repeal plan Democrats can’t stop

This turnabout with the nuclear option reminds me of the terrorists who blow themselves up with their own bombs: stupid; stupid; stupid. The Left did it to themselves, and deserve to have to choke it down.

Poster Boy: Trump Derangement Syndrome

There are so many examples of Trump-derangement syndrome that I have not posted any (many?). But Joseph Murphy seems to embody all of the futile eruptions of all the multitudes of hate which the Left has produced and is producing.

Man, 20, 'yells "f*** Trump", tries to choke himself and urinates on a state trooper' after being arrested for disorderly intoxication at Disney

Joseph Murphy was arrested near Disney Springs early Sunday morning
He was charged with battery on an officer, indecent exposure of sexual organs and resisting an officer without violence

The incident kicked off when two Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrested Murphy for disorderly intoxication, saying he reeked of alcohol

Once inside a trooper's car, he started banging his head against a partition, tried to choke himself and was yelling 'police brutality' and 'f*** Donald Trump'

When troopers brought him to the Orange County Jail, Murphy banged his head against a car window and started urinating on the floor, police said

He then urinated on one of the trooper's pants, leaving a wet spot on the trooper's uniform, police said

Delingpole's Manifesto

A Lasting and Accurate Analog: The Dogshit Yogurt Fallacy.

Rules for Righties — a War-Winning Manifesto for 2017

Samples of the Manifesto:

"No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally left-wing one or the notionally right-wing one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite.

Of course we should always despise the liberal-left because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are; sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise.

I call the latter approach the “dogshit yogurt fallacy.”

If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation – much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so – to say: “All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?” We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong; and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for."

And this:

"We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender

See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys – and it is, invariably, men – who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the “sexist” shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful liberal-left doesn’t just want humiliation – it wants total annihilation.

Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile – but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a “beautiful creature” because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification.

Look, I know it’s a scary thing when the SJW witch-hunt mob turns on you. But read Vox Day’s SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender! (And if you need reminding why not, read this piece I wrote the other day, of which I am very proud)"

Much More at the Site.

Sowell on Gun Control

Liberals imagine that law-abiding citizens do not have any idea how to use a gun responsibly — and that criminals will start following rules.

"Sometimes someone inadvertently performs a public service by bringing an unbelievably stupid and dangerous idea to the surface, where it can be exposed for what it is.

The New York Times can be credited — if that is the word — with performing this public service in a recent editorial against proposals to allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed guns. They refer to what they call the National Rifle Association’s “fantasy that citizens can stand up to gunmen by shooting it out.”

Nobody has suggested any such thing. Data collected over many years — but almost never seeing the light of day in the New York Times or the rest of the mainstream media — show many thousands of examples of people defending themselves with a gun each year, without having to pull the trigger.

If someone comes at you with a knife and you pull out a gun, chances are they will stop. The only time I ever pointed a gun at a human being, it was when someone was sneaking up toward me from behind a shed in the middle of the night. I never fired a shot. I just pointed the gun at him and told him to stop. He stopped.

Actually having to shoot someone is the exception, not the rule. Yet the New York Times conjures up a vision of something like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Concealed guns protect not only those who carry them but also those who do not. If concealed guns become widespread, then a mugger or a carjacker has no way of knowing who has one and who does not. It makes being a mugger or a carjacker a less safe occupation. Gun-control laws are in effect occupational-safety laws — OSHA for burglars, muggers, carjackers, and others.

The fatal fallacy of gun-control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns. Criminals who disobey other laws are not likely to be stopped by gun-control laws. What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.

What puts a stop to mass shootings? Usually the arrival on the scene of somebody else with a gun. Mass shootings are often used as examples of a need for gun control. But what puts a stop to mass shootings? Usually the arrival on the scene of somebody else with a gun.

Mass shooters are often portrayed as “irrational” people engaged in “senseless” acts. But mass shooters are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.

Seldom do we hear about these “irrational” shooters engaging in “senseless” attacks on meetings of the National Rifle Association or a local gun show or a National Guard armory.

The fallacy of believing that the way to reduce shootings is to disarm peaceful people extends from domestic gun-control laws to international disarmament agreements. If disarmament agreements reduced the dangers of war, there would never have been a World War II.

The decades leading up to that war were filled with international disarmament agreements. As with domestic gun-control laws, the agreements were followed by peaceful countries and ignored by belligerent countries that built up huge war machines, such as in Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

The net result was that the belligerent countries had every incentive to start wars, and that they inflicted devastating losses on the peaceful countries that had drastically curtailed their own military forces.

Eventually the Western democracies got their act together and turned things around, after they belatedly beefed up their military forces. But thousands of lives were lost needlessly before that happened. World War II was in its third year before Western forces won a single battle.

Undaunted by history, the same kind of thinking that had cheered international disarmament treaties in the 1920s and 1930s once again cheered Soviet–American disarmament agreements during the Cold War.

Conversely, there was hysteria when President Ronald Reagan began building up American military forces in the 1980s. Cries were heard that he was leading us toward nuclear war. In reality, he led us toward an end of the Cold War, without a shot being fired at the Soviet Union.

But who reads history these days, or checks facts before leading the charge to keep law-abiding people disarmed?"

If Democrats/Leftist cared about the safety of children, they would protect them, wouldn't they? By placing schools into the Free Fire Targeting zones, they do the opposite. They even fear having armed professional guards, because "guns kill people". Then they weep oceans of tears when a shooter disobeys the No Guns sign, and kills a bunch of kids. They have the information: mass shooters go where guns are prohibited. As Sowell says, you never hear of a mass shooting at an NRA meeting or at a gun range.

Evidence does not drive Democrat/Leftist/Atheist "illogic"; the Atheist moral narrative which secures Leftist elitism ignores contrary evidence as if it does not exist. It is against the moral narrative to allow the designated Oppressor Class and Kill Class to have weapons. And by the way, the class of black gang-bangers is a Victimhood Class which is utilizing its First Amendment Right to express cultural distress by using guns in gun free zones. So of course it is the constabulary which is the Oppressor Class.

It's all traceable back to the Marxist three class system assault on free society, free people, and unbiased government.

Dave Berry's Review of the Year 2016

Dave Barry’s Year in Review: 2016 — What the ... ?

Go there. Just Do It.

Logic Lesson For Muddy-Mind Merkel

"YOU KNOW WHAT HELPS CURB THAT? NOT IMPORTING TERRORISTS: Merkel: Islamist terror is ‘greatest threat’ to Germany."
Hoyt on Instapundit

Best Buds

Criminally Stupid